Two comments:
Trump claims the Times investigation is "fake news." If this is indeed true, he can prove it by showing us his tax returns. The years that were investigated were 2000-2018, and it would be impossible for all of those years to still be under audit. So let him show all the years that aren't under audit. .If he doesn't, we need to assume that they're "real news."
In all the years where he had huge business losses, he lived a very lavish lifestyle. So if he was actually bleeding money, there is only one way he could support that very lavish lifestyle---by taking every penny that supported his lavish lifestyle as a "business expense." Can you do that? Of course not.
The thing about crying fowl that his returns are now in the hands of the press and becoming public is that
releasing tax records for presidential candidates has been a tradition and norm since 1976 and Biden’s tax records are and have been a matter of public record. Trump should had made these tax records public in 2016 when he was running for president, and it’s very telling he didn’t.
If, in fact, the NYT received forged documents (not very likely; I will mutter darkly about them de facto firing James Bennet, but the fact of the matter is that they have been exemplarily in vetting and handling secret documents for a very long time; the
Pentagon Papers comes to mind) Trump can discredit the NYT tomorrow by releasing his real returns like every other presidential candidate has since 1976.
This is
very different than the Democrat Party’s private emails being hacked by foreign agents and given to everyone to look at in 2016; it is very telling that the Republican Party’s private emails were never breached and made public. In that case, the “where did they get them?” question was very relevant, since we also had the “why weren’t the Republican emails hacked?” question.
The “where did the NYT get them” question here is
not relevant, because the answer to that question
should be “The New York Times got Trump’s tax returns from his campaign manager in 2016 when he, like every other single major party presidential candidate since 1976, released them to the public”.
So, for people who question these returns from the NYT, two questions: 1) When has The New York Times botched a story this big in the last 50 years? People have brought up CBS botching a story this big over a decade ago, but
The New York Times is not CBS. I have read numerous debates on the Wikipedia about how reliable the NYT is, and the worst we can accuse them of is being inaccurate about technical medical details concerning the damage caused by bullets. 2) Why has Trump never made his tax returns public, breaking a four decade tradition?
Another issue, not brought up here but which should be addressed is this: I have read that Trump reporting these kinds of losses is just good tax accounting, and that a business man as successful as Trump, of course, will have some failed ventures, comparing Trump’s personal returns to Amazon’s corporate taxes. The problem with this argument is that if Trump has a lot of successful businesses making a lot of money, he should have a lot of income to report on his tax return; to be showing a loss either shows that 1) Trump is a failed business man, or 2) that he is engaging in criminal tax fraud. Pick one.
The Amazon comparison is invalid: Amazon didn’t pay taxes because of deferral, tax losses from years ago being carried forward, and R&D investment; Trump hasn’t paid taxes because of straight up business losses. Also, Trump paid $750 in taxes each year;
Amazon paid 2.6 billion in corporate tax
